The Latest from FILCOLS member ATENEO PRESS

LIGHT, a collection of selected stories by Joy T. Dayrit, edited by
Edna Zapanta Manlapaz, will be launched on Wednesday, May 16, from
4.30 pm, at the Ateneo Library of Women's Writings, beside the Ateneo
Art Gallery, Admu campus. The launch also features the exhibit opening
of Dayrit's paintings, a few of which have been reproduced in the book.

Joy T. Dayrit (1944-2011) published her first stories under the
literary editorship of Nick Joaquin in the Philippines Free Press and
subsequently in the Asia-Philippines Leader. In the late 1960s she ran
an art gallery called PRINT, which started as a small exhibition space
for drawings and prints and evolved into an alternative space for
experimental art until its closure in the early 1970s.

LIGHT gathers 24 of Dayrit's published and unpublished stories by
which, Manlapaz says, "are those Joy herself would wish to be read and
remembered." And because she "finally, happily accepted herself as
simultaneously writer and visual artist," this volume features art
work by Joy on the cover and in each of the sections in the book.

According to Danton Remoto, "[t]he woman in the flux of forming her
self--or her many selves--lies at the heart of many of the stories.
Hemmed in by patriarchy, shaped by her society, she nevertheless tries
to break free." Reflecting on why her stories seem to him so new,
Larry Ypil says it is because they are not just stories: "The irony in
Dayrit?s stories is the irony of fiction itself: that we attempt to
capture life by making it up, through word and image, as we go along."

Rica Bolipata-Santos sees in her writing "the painstaking detail given
to objects that inhabit space so that it does not take flight;
thumbtacks placed on context and setting. Sometimes the detailing is
in dialogue, how evenly measured, its cadence I can imagine she tapped
using her cane. Her characters "became" or were always in the process
"of becoming" --- that obscure moment in between a "before" and
"after" pinned, delineated, figured (in the painterly sense). Like the
way she wrote, loved, and lived, it looked effortless, inevitable, and
yet you knew it came with knowing the deepest pain."

LIGHT will be available at a special price at the launch venue, and
will soon be in good bookstores. (Ateneo Press: unipress@admu.edu.ph,
tel 4265984)

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Ateneo de Manila University Press
Ground Floor, Bellarmine Hall
Ateneo de Manila University campus
Katipunan Ave., Loyola Heights
Quezon City PHILIPPINES
Tel. 63-2-4265984

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www.ateneopress.org